The graduation exhibition of the final year students from the Jewellery and Blacksmithing department of the Estonian Academy of Arts, “It Doesn’t Mean Anything” opens on the 28th of May. But this doesn’t mean it’s the end. It actually doesn’t mean anything.

Artist list

Soon our studies will be over, and the final project should neatly tie together all the ideas and styles we as artists have cultivated during our time here. It’s as if the graduation show was a door one could proudly shut in order to exclaim: ‘These people are now Artists!”. We don’t agree with that. The end of school doesn’t mean anything – learning never ends. The encouraging and guiding environment of the school is now replaced with independent choices and personal responsibility.

Searching for complicated meanings and sticking them onto an artwork has become common practice. So that sometimes, once you’ve peeled off all the pretty stories, you feel you find an empty thing at its heart. Surrounded by our colleagues, every action and choice seems meaningful, but what if our work makes no sense in the larger context of the world...? We believe that there is, in fact, meaning in what we do. The things we create do not always need to have some profound philosophy attached to them; they can be just about the creation of something and the process that has led us there. Every work of art has a reason for having been made, but it is the viewer who creates the meaning. Each one of us has to find for themselves the element in the art that touches us, and that is what makes it meaningful or meaningless.